Great products thrive on constant feedback from users. Each person’s in a different stage of their relationship to your product though, so how do you ask them the right questions at the right time? Is it enough to set up a regular NPS survey and call it a day? Or to only talk to users once they’ve lapsed? Spoiler alert: it’s not.

You don’t have time to be wrong about your assumptions. What are your key assumptions? What if they’re all wrong? — Erika Hall, Just Enough Research

Matt Mullenweg said “Usage is like oxygen for ideas.” The first step to building a better product is to ship early and often. The second step is to listen to the people using it.

Between the time Mike and I spent working on Foursquare and our experience building our ownprojects, we saw time and time again that hearing about users’ qualitative experiences led to huge changes in how we thought about our products. That phenomenon has held true for us whether the product was in beta or 5 years old, whether it had 5 users or 50 million. We wanted to build a company around this idea: better feedback makes better products.

Much of the time I spend using my phone is consumption: reading, watching, listening. When I want to create something on my phone, I usually want to get in and get out as quickly as possible. Add something to the grocery list before the garlic I’m cooking starts to smoke. Pay a coworker on Venmo as we walk back to the office from Chipotle. Jot down a movie recommendation from a friend without interrupting our dinner.

The problem is, most of the apps we use aren’t optimized for input. Getting to the place where you create a task, add to a list or enter text usually means 1) Finding the correct app, 2) opening it and waiting for it to load, 3) finding the button or tab to get to compose mode, and then 4) doing what you came to do. Sometimes you have to do even more navigating to find the right file, list, or friend to message. This might only take a few seconds, but when you’re cooking, talking, or navigating pedestrian traffic, a few seconds can feel like forever.

I wanted to see if I could get those four steps down to one, so I built Input.

At Foursquare, we spent the first 8 months of 2014 on our biggest project ever: splitting our two-use-case app into two single-use-case apps. With that giant project behind us, I’m entering 2015 thinking about how to be as effective as I can as a designer in the brave new world of Foursquare. How do I make the most of my time and attention without a huge, looming, all-consuming deadline? How do I best contribute to making what we’ve built over the past year smoother, simpler, and more sustainable? Should we have just kept splitting the app over and over until we had a separate app for each of our millions of users? After much weighty pondering, here are my five New Year’s design resolutions.